Nicholas Nixon's 'Brown Sisters' on display at the ICA

BOSTON - For 42 years, photographer Nicholas Nixon has made portraits of his wife and her three sisters. Even when one sister was living in Japan, she flew back to make sure no gaps occurred.

That remarkable consistency is on view in the exhibit “Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

From the first in 1975 to the most recent in 2017, the black and white images reveal the inexorable passing of time and the unchanging bond between the Brown sisters.

“The five of us do it, because it means something to us,” said Nixon in the audio guide. “We’re doing it the same way we always have, and I cherish that it’s a simple thing we’re doing every year.”

With 71 additional images from Nixon’s Couples series, People with Aids series, elderly series and other topics, the exhibit feels like a mediation on time, intimacy, vulnerability and aging.

Nixon, a Brookline resident and professor of photography at Mass College of Art and Design who has exhibited in major museums across the country, took the first portrait on a whim in Connecticut, when his wife, Bebe, was 25, and her sisters were 23, 21 and 15.

“They liked that I didn’t tell them what to do,” he said. “I wanted them to be present in any way they wanted.”

After the second portrait, Nixon said, “Hey, let’s do this forever.”

In every 8-by-10 picture – shot in film with a large format camera – the sisters stand in the same order, with the second and third sisters on the ends and the youngest and oldest in the middle. In each photo, they stand close together, with their arms wrapped around each other in various ways. They don’t smile, yet they are not somber.

In almost all, they are tightly framed outdoors, often at various locations on Cape Cod. They seem like one unit, facing the world unflinchingly perhaps because they have the support of each other.

Instead of walking clockwise as the sisters gain years, the viewer proceeds counter clockwise, as though the display emphasizes the long ago origin of this series. Their hairstyles change and their faces become increasingly wrinkled, yet the young woman still can be clearly seen in the older version.

Shooting at close range and often in natural light, Nixon created images that are crisp, sharp, luminous and detailed. Two of the most moving are of Tom Moran, a Braintree man with AIDS.

“I was offended at how people with AIDS were portrayed in the media,” he said.

Aiming to express Moran’s humanity, Nixon photographed him and his mother in an embrace in 1987 and the next year photographed him lying near death on the white sheets of a hospital bed. It’s startling and deeply sad to see Moran, alone with eyes closed, his former liveliness gone.

Equally moving is the portrait of former Miss New York, Anna English, an elderly woman whose heavily wrinkled face rests on her palm and whose downcast eyes seem to recall a happier time and acknowledge the nearness of death.

“What we forget is that she’s remembering her whole life, but we’re seeing what is right now,” Nixon said.

Nixon also took portraits of children at Perkins School for the Blind.

“I was touched by their faces,” he said. “They were so innocent and expressive and unaware of anybody looking at them.”

In the couples series, Nixon expressed intimacy with the barest of details and also offered a sort of self-portrait. He and Bebe kiss, with just their lips and chin captured; they lie together, with just a portion of leg flesh exposed; they press their faces together, the camera seeing just one eye of each.

“Two happy old creatures getting on together,” he said.

With their expression of happiness, connection and loss, the Nixon photos offer an artful and moving perspective on living life.